* Enforce restrictions in plperl using an opmask applied to the whole
interpreter, instead of using "Safe.pm"
* Prevent PL/Tcl from executing untrustworthy code from pltcl_modules
* Fix data corruption during WAL replay of ALTER ... SET TABLESPACE
* Fix possible crash if a cache reset message is received during
rebuild of a relcache entry
* Apply per-function GUC settings while running the language
validator for the function
* Do constraint exclusion for inherited "UPDATE" and "DELETE" target
tables when constraint_exclusion = partition
* Do not allow an unprivileged user to reset superuser-only parameter
settings
* Avoid possible crash during backend shutdown if shutdown occurs
when a CONTEXT addition would be made to log entries
* Fix erroneous handling of %r parameter in recovery_end_command
* Ensure the archiver process responds to changes in archive_command
as soon as possible
* Fix pl/pgsql's CASE statement to not fail when the case expression
is a query that returns no rows
* Update pl/perl's "ppport.h" for modern Perl versions
* Fix assorted memory leaks in pl/python
* Handle empty-string connect parameters properly in ecpg
* Prevent infinite recursion in psql when expanding a variable that
refers to itself
* Fix psql's \copy to not add spaces around a dot within \copy
(select ...)
* Avoid formatting failure in psql when running in a locale context
that doesn't match the client_encoding
* Fix unnecessary "GIN indexes do not support whole-index scans"
errors for unsatisfiable queries using "contrib/intarray" operators
* Ensure that "contrib/pgstattuple" functions respond to cancel
interrupts promptly
* Make server startup deal properly with the case that shmget()
returns EINVAL for an existing shared memory segment
* Avoid possible crashes in syslogger process on Windows
* Deal more robustly with incomplete time zone information in the
Windows registry
* Update the set of known Windows time zone names
* Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2010j for DST law
changes in Argentina, Australian Antarctic, Bangladesh, Mexico,
Morocco, Pakistan, Palestine, Russia, Syria, Tunisia; also
historical corrections for Taiwan.
Also, add PKST (Pakistan Summer Time) to the default set of
timezone abbreviations.
monitoring tools and commands. Each user has their own favorite features which
will make day-to-day work with PostgreSQL easier and more productive for them.
Among the most popular enhancements are:
* Parallel Database Restore, speeding up recovery from backup up to 8 times
* Per-Column Permissions, allowing more granular control of sensitive data
* Per-database Collation Support, making PostgreSQL more useful in
multi-lingual environments
* In-place Upgrades through pg_migrator (beta), enabling upgrades from 8.3 to
8.4 without extensive downtime
* New Query Monitoring Tools, giving administrators more insight into query
activity
* Greatly Reduced VACUUM Overhead through the Visibility Map
* New Monitoring Tools for current queries, query load and deadlocks
Version 8.4 also makes data analysis easier through the advanced ANSI SQL2003
features of windowing functions, common table expressions and recursive queries.
Enhancements to stored procedures, such as default parameters and variadic
parameters, make database server programming simpler and more compact.
Of course, there are also performance improvements included in this version.
